CHAPTER 1
“Isaid I do not want any more of them sold.”
Anne Carlisle stood in the doorway of the morning room at Rosemere House, her dark chestnut hair falling down her back in waves. Her tall and slender frame usually leaned against the frame, but that morning she was entirely upright, her gray-blue eyes focused entirely on her mother.
Lady Eleanor Carlisle, a woman in her early fifties with fair hair pinned beneath a simple black mourning cap, did not immediately look up from the letters spread across her desk.
“Any more of what?” she asked quietly.
“Anything else belonging to Papa.”
“That is not your decision to make, Anne.”
“It is my home, too,” Anne replied evenly. “And my family.”
Lady Carlisle finally lifted her gaze. “And it remains your home because I have made it so.”
“At what cost?”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Do not speak to me as though I am your adversary.”
“I am asking a question,” Anne said. “A simple one.”
“You are being deliberately difficult.”
“And you are informing me far too late about decisions that affect me,” Anne argued.
A brief silence followed.
“What has been sold?” she asked.
Lady Carlise hesitated just long enough for Anne to know that she would not like the response.
“Three horses,” she said.
“Which ones?”
“Bracken, Hollowmere, and the Ashfall mare,” Lady Carlise replied. “It is not just your horses, though. The eastern pasture lease has been transferred, and the south gallery paintings have been sold.”
Anne’s hands remained still at her sides.
“And what remains?” she asked.
“Enough.”
Anne turned slightly toward the window. Beyond the glass, the grounds stretched out in muted greens and grays under a cold Yorkshire sky. The estate had always been beautiful, but now it looked as if it were held together rather than well-maintained.
Lady Carlisle watched her carefully. “Every decision I make is to preserve what is left.”
“But this is not—have you not thought of what Papa would have wanted? It is not that you have sold things. You have specifically sold what he loved most.”
“Yes, well, he may tell me himself if he takes issue with it.”
Silence ensued, which mercifully was interrupted by a knock at the door. A servant entered, a young man in a dark livery coat, holding a sealed letter on a silver tray.
“For Miss Anne,” he announced.
Anne accepted it without looking away from her mother. The wax seal was unfamiliar, pressed deep with a black insignia she did not recognize.
